Quotes About Community

Good made the powerful point that there's a vast difference between how we think about the term failure and how we think about the people and organizations brave enough to share their failures for the purpose of learning and growing. To pretend that we can get to helping, generous, and brave without navigating through tough emotions like desperation, shame, and panic is a profoundly dangerous and misguided assumption.

Not caring about our own pain and the pain of others is not working. How much longer are we willing to keep pulling drowning people out of the river one by one, rather than walking to the headwaters of the river to find the source of the pain? What will it take for us to let go of that earned self-righteousness and travel together to the cradle of the pain that is throwing all of us in at such a rate that we couldn't possibly save everyone?

In an interview with Bill Moyers that aired on public television in 1973, Dr. Angelou said: You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.

We have to belong to ourselves as much as we need to belong to others. Any belonging that asks us to betray ourselves is not true belonging.

She wasn't afraid of people in need because she wasn't afraid of needing others," my mom explained. "She didn't mind extending kindness to others, because she herself relied on the kindness of others." My mom and I didn't need to unpack the emotion behind that story. We both understood what MeeMaw had that we didn't: The capacity to receive.

Empathy is a strange and powerful thing. There is no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It's simply listening, holding space, withholding judgement, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of "you're not alone.

The Latin paradoxum means "seemingly absurd but really true." True belonging is not something that you negotiate externally, it's what you carry in your heart. It's finding the sacredness in being a part of something and in braving the wilderness alone.

But the more we're willing to seek out moments of collective joy and show up for experiences of collective pain—for real, in person, not online—the more difficult it becomes to deny our human connection, even with people we may disagree with.

Steve and I didn't leave religion because we stopped believing in God. Religion left us when it started putting politics and certainty before love and mystery.

To grow to adulthood as a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it's to become the one on whom others can depend.

We invite compassion into our lives when we act compassionately toward ourselves and others, and we feel connected in our lives when we reach out and connect.

Walking away from people we know and love, because of our support for strangers we really don't know, can barely believe, and definitely don't love, who FOR SURE won't be there to drive us to chemo or bring food over when the kids are sick; that is the shadow side of sorting.

May you always do for others and let others do for you. —Bob Dylan

As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.

help us create a culture of belonging at work.

We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When

power with multiplies individual talents, knowledge, and resources to make a larger impact.

But the feeling of scarcity does thrive in shame-prone cultures that are deeply steeped in comparison and fractured by disengagement.

And they all share the same formula of shame, comparison, and disengagement. Scarcity bubbles up from these conditions and perpetuates them until a critical mass of people start making different choices and reshaping the smaller cultures they belong to.

After doing this work for the past twelve years and watching scarcity ride roughshod over our families, organizations, and communities, I'd say the one thing we have in common is that we're sick of feeling afraid. We want to dare greatly. We're tired of the national conversation centering on "What should we fear?" and "Who should we blame?" We all want to be brave.

what do your team members do that earns your trust? The most common answer: asking for help.

Every single one of us is someone else's other.

Laughter, song, and dance create emotional and spiritual connection; they remind us of the one thing that truly matters when we are searching for comfort, celebration, inspiration, or healing: We are not alone. Ironically,

Belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it. Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.